A/N: this is very short and has religous themes to it. Also may be even more ooc for Zack but i think it is plausible. Plus I just couldn't leave it where it was overnight. I'm not that mean.

Booth felt like he should be kneeling, but it just wasn't possible. Even getting on his knees to pray would tear out the stitches that held the muscles in his thigh together. So he sat there in the pew thinking and reflecting over the last week. Wilson had been right. They had not been prepared enough, and the cost had been high. He could walk, sort of, but his leg still hurt badly. But he had been the lucky one. Two dead, one totally brain dead just waiting for his body to realize it, one in a coma, and one at least able to get around. If you could call the pitiful hurt-arm-hurt-leg-one-crutch shuffle Zack currently used getting around.

He watched the younger man hobble inside the chapel and struggle up to sit beside Booth. Zack looked terrible. Even after a week there was still very little color in the young man's skin, giving the normally pale scientist an almost ghostly appearance. A plaster cast with metal brackets in two different places. He was only able to use one crutch as his right arm was immobilized following the surgery to put his shoulder and the right side of his chest back together after Melissa's bullet tore through him. Bandages and the shoulder immobilizer like Casey had worn when she broke her shoulder were visible through the hospital gown and scrub pants the hospital had provided for him. He was silent, sitting there beside Booth, unsure of what to do or say.

Booth finally broke the silence. "Zack, I'm sorry. If I could do over again…"

Zack nodded weakly. "I know. It wasn't your fault." But that was the thing…it was his fault. All of it. If he hadn't been so hard on Casey, demanded to know the truth, threatened to tear the only safe world she had ever found apart, none of this would have ever happened. They never would have found her, Zack wouldn't be hurt, Wilson would be alive, Casey…well, she wouldn't be upstairs hovering in the limbo between life and death.

Zach's voice was as soft as a small child. "She slit her wrist to give me a chance to escape. She wanted me to run away and leave her, but there was no way! I couldn't leave her alone with them, even if it meant I would die too, I wasn't leaving her." He fiddled with the straps on the shoulder immobilizer, and Booth felt uncharacteristic urge to hug the boy, to comfort him, tell him it would all be alright. But it wasn't alright. Casey may never wake up, and even if she did it God only knew what kind of mental scars she would carry. She had shot her own mother! After all she had been through, what if this was the breaking point?

And her breaking point might be a moot point. She had lost a ton of blood from her wrist, even before she had been shot. As far as escape plans worked, that one had sucked. She had taken one bullet in the chest, puncturing her lung, and one in the abdomen, nicking her liver, spleen, colon, several blood vessels. Most of it had been repaired, the spleen had been removed, and the blood vessels patched up, but she had lost a lot of blood. She had been in a coma for almost a week, and there was a very real chance that she might never wake up. Or if she did, she had a 40 percent chance of brain damage from lack of blood.

Her mother was dead, of course, and so was Wilson. Thomas was brain dead just waiting for his body to catch up. And Casey was…in the balance. That left Zack and Booth to try to pick up the pieces. And Zack was certainly shattered into a million pieces, with Booth only a few behind him. They sat there, side by side in the empty chapel, one seeking solace and forgiveness, one seeking something slightly more elusive. It was so quiet that Booth jumped when Zack suddenly spoke up. "Booth, will you teach me to pray?"

Booth turned to the broken boy sitting beside him, a scared kid bearing a man's pain, and looked him up and down. "I thought you didn't believe in God?"

Zack was quiet, then looked up to meet his eyes. "Casey believes. And I…I want to believe."

Booth proceeded carefully. "You want to pray for Casey to get better?"

Zack stared at the floor, and began to talk in the machine-gun manner that he had when he got nervous. "I want to pray for that, yeah, but not only for that. I want to pray that I can believe because she believes and I want to think that she's right and that there's more than this out there. I want to think that there is a place out there that she will go to if she doesn't…doesn't wake up…where she'll be safe and happy and where she will know she's loved. If I'm right and this is all there is, then she has been here for 24 years and felt nothing more than fear and pain and I don't want to believe that anymore!"

He took a breath, the last of his meager energy stores expended, and Booth spoke. "She felt more than fear and pain, Zack. She had six years of a good life. Not much, but she was happy while she was here. She loved you, and she knew she was loved." Tears leaked out of the corners of Zack's eyes and Booth realized he had been talking about her in the past tense, as if she were already dead. "I'm sorry, Zack. She's going to get better." Zack didn't respond, and Booth knew what he had to do from there. "First you put your hands together like this…"

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Brennan stood in fascination at the door of the chapel, watching Booth and Zack. Was Zack actually praying? It had been stressful, but this was not what she had expected from her assistant. But while she didn't understand their superstition, she did respect Booth, and her news could wait until they were done.